We live in a day and age where you can make a pretty decent living as a scientist without actually advancing science, or doing very much technologically related labor, only natural people would game the system. While science should be immune to this sort of thing, just how many unimportant not particularly interesting results do people actually try to reproduce ?

Control of the content is more important to the broadcasters than having an expanded market. The question is why ?

Oh I believe you underestimate the stupidity of the electorate and the congressional love of pork.

Figures for NASA's SLS costs

http://www.thespacereview.com/...

They are putting the costs at a potential 5 billion/launch before any development overruns.

This is to get us to Mars. Brilliant like we have done so much with the Moon in half century since we went all out to get there.
 

Sorry that's a seperate microtransaction. You need 500 slashdot points for that.

Be interesting to see what wins. So far masochism looks like it dominates every online game I have ever seen. I remember when City of Heroes launched going rogue, and had Gamestop only gear. I have to think that pissed off veteran players who didn't need to buy the game and people in other countries that didn't get access. Can't imagine that anyone who didn't like Gamestop but played the game was happy about this either.

Anyway look at any MMO's forums.

1 Comment the game is horribly buggy, Response all software has bugs you should learn to live with it.
2. Game breaking bugs are not being fixed in a timely fashion. Response: Programming is hard did you expect these people to do it right ?
3. Continual rebalancing of the game resulting in stranded non performing characters. Response: That's the life of an online gamer.
4. Developers shifting ever more content into layered methods of cash extraction, gets a non response.

I can certainly appreciate the feeling ardent players have to support their favorite online games, but you do have to wonder at what point they wake up and realize that the publishers see them as nothing but a bunch of greenbacks, and their best strategy is to view the publishers as people trying to do as little as possible to get maximum return. Think about it how many times do you see add on content that is essentially pay to win in one way or another going for a significant fraction of the initial game cost even though there is little to it ?

  It just make

Man Microsoft pulled a Rome to Borland's Carthage here. True you can't use Turbo Pascal but you can use Delphi the Indy Lib, and intraweb

http://www.embarcadero.com/pro...

http://www.indyproject.org/ind...

http://www.atozed.com/intraweb...

Really incredible tools for getting the job done better than so much of what is out there, they only have a couple problems

1. They aren't hip and score no points in games of buzzword bingo
2. They work.

OH man it's Barbie's first web project there. I guess that attitude really goes so far to explaining why websites usually don't have anywhere near as nice a threaded comment system as Slashdot does.

I am old and you don't see me complaining about nail guns.

Even though, I am pretty sure 3D printers are just toys for spoiled youngsters that never saw the inside of a machine shop or know which end of a saw to hold.

Hell we we will be out of helium on earth before we are doing anything useful on mars.
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

So at the very least it will be something useful even if horribly expensive.

Even the Roanoak colony had a business plan, Whats the one for Mars ? Sell advertising time to fund the launch ? (Note a heck of better way to spend them than giving them to facebook)

I remember watching Apollo 11 land it's about damn time we did something useful.

Asteroid Capture, YES !!
Permanent Lunar presence for Helium 3 extraction YES

Marooning people on Mars to die ? I can't express how wrong that is.